nathanfish.com » Web Services

Subscription management services for SaaS businesses

nathan — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:48:56 +0000

There is a rise in the number of payment management services for SaaS based businesses. The growth is good, it shows there is an increasing trend to subscription based businesses online and away from the software or long term licensing. However, many of these SaaS based businesses are just a wrapper around payment gateways. Their value is in the ease at which they enable the software developer to integrate a recurring payment stream. They provide reporting on top of the payment systems but they do little more. They don’t seem to integrate well with marketing efforts. Here’s a quick list of the ones I have checked out.

Chargify.com – Is a dedicated SaaS solution with easy integration and solid management of failed charges through Dunning. Chargify supports only Authorize.net as a payment option, which limits their applicability to some companies. Fixed pricing based on number of customers managed.

Zuora.com – The Salesforce.com of SaaS subscription management solutions. Zuora is an “enterprise” model, from its web site to its lack of pricing details. They have all the bells and whistles but may not be a good fit for the small nimble start up.

Vindicia.com – Another enterprise player in the SaaS subscription management solution space. They look to target online gaming and virtual worlds. This is a unique differentiator from Zuora.com which is focused at SaaS and service based businesses.

CheedarGetter.com – Dedicated SaaS subscription management solution targeted at the small business, similar to Chargify. CheedarGetter offers more options in terms of user management and pricing including aggregated transaction billing solutions and feature specific pricing. Only offers support for Authorize.net as a payment gateway. Pricing is either fixed or percent per transaction.

Spreedly.com – Dedicated SaaS subscription management solution similar to CheedarGetter.com and Chargify.com. They support feature sets, promotions, free services, etc. What makes them stand apart from others is their support for multiple payment gateways including PayPal and others. Pricing is fixed per month plus a fixed fee per transaction.

Know of another SaaS subscription management service provider? Leave a comment and let me know.

Yahoo Shuts Down Shopping API

nathan — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:58:15 +0000

Yahoo has offered one of the broadest ranges of API’s for developers. The breadth has made it possible for numerous entrepreneurs to build out supplemental incomes or be their own boss businesses. However, as they begin to realign their business and strategies they have begun to kill off the API’s that made them so popular with developer/entrepreneur. The recent end of life for the Shopping API and the backlash highlights the risks in providing API’s http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/01/yahoo_shopping_api_announcement.html and the impact it has when you find API’s don’t offer value to the bottom line. They may have offered growth but that growth becomes a risk as costs overcome generated revenue. Many have lost their faith in Yahoo as an API end point and have begun looking for business continuity through other partners. My own thoughts go to other businesses that offer API’s that other small business rely on to make money, for example Twitter or Facebook for that matter. At what point does that provisioning become a risk and how is it addressed? What models are in place, what needs will there be in the future? Limitation on calls? Pay-for-provisioning? Revenue sharing? The model will be heavily dependent on the nature of the business. If the API provides direct revenue to the provider then it would be possible to pay people for API usage not charge them. Citysearch does this, but are there other businesses that could do the same?

Facebook Connect Wizard makes things really easy

nathan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:44:57 +0000

Facebook connect wizard has gone live. The super easy way to add facebook connect to your site with the facebook connect wizard. I was able to integrate into the sidebar of this wordpress blog in less then 5 minutes. I’m not sure the value to visitors, but certainly was easy to integrate. The Playground is also a nice touch, making it easy to test API calls and other possible integration options. Still have a lot to play with and understand. It’s a great move on Facebook’s part to make them more pervasive across the web.

Fast & East Way To Add Single Sign On

nathan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:55:42 +0000

If your thinking about supporting Open ID, so your users can use their MySpace, Google, Facebook, or another service identity provider you should consider https://rpxnow.com/. Integration is simple, it supports all the major service providers and adds some nice analytics on top. Save yourself some time and effort, integrate once and support them all.

Yahoo YQL – Web Service Innovation

nathan — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:39:58 +0000

Yahoo recently launched YQL http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ it provides developers with unique and compelling access to structured data. Instead of calling different web service interfaces that have limited inputs and limited outputs, you simply write a query. This is brilliant. As a developer I previously had to call multiple services, using different inputs, capture all the data and merge it into a meaningful experience for the user. Now all I have to do is create a single query, get the data in the way I want and present to the user. It’s like righting a SQL query, with joins, and all the other fancy stuff. This is cutting edge stuff and I’m very interested in seeing who will be next to support something like this. Personally Google Analytics comes to mind. Right now their API is very limiting, and highlights the challenges with current API development. The interface can be very limiting for the developer. Limiting applicability or causing inefficient use of API’s to achieve results. I have seen, for example, a loop through thousands of results from one API to get additional details on each of the items in the result. YQL will certainly allow a developer to avoid that mess. Now if only I could use proxy YQL service to mashup sources across platforms, get data from Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, Google in a single YQL like call. Dreams, I know, but the amazing consumer applications that could be created, easily and without any fuss. Add in some data portability and I’m in mashup heaven.

Update: YQL does allow you to access other web services using the YQL syntax, its called “YQL Open Tables”. You simply define a few things in an XML file and you can use YQL to query Amazon products, etc. This is really great stuff. Thanks to spullara for pointing it out.

The challenge with Facebook Connect

nathan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:05:31 +0000

Facebook connect offers a very real value. It allows third party web applications like Citysearch to interact with a users Facebook account. It means the user doesn’t have to create a Citysearch account to be a Citysearch user, and the user only needs to login to their Facebook account to use Citysearch functionality. Oauth and Open ID combined provide similar functionality in an open standards way, but they have some limitations that businesses should consider before jumping on the bandwagon.

Data portability with Facebook connect or OAuth doesn’t extend to third party applications. In the example above a third party Facebook connect developer that would like to access a Facebook users data on Citysearch doesn’t have many options. The current method would be to have the user first login to the Facebook Connect through the third party application then go through another set of prompts to authenticate the third party application to access their Citysearch data. While this isn’t the end of the world it does create numerous steps for the user, each of which creates complexity and limits adoption. In the OAuth world its called the four-legged scenario and to date there hasn’t been an user centric way to solve for it.

What would the ideal world look like? I think it would be great if Facebook could acts as a proxy for the many services that connect to it. For example MySpecialReviewApplication which mashes up my Facebook photos with my reviews from Citysearch and shares them with all with my friends on Twitter using TwitPics was able to simply call Facebook and Facebook could negotiate and manage service access. I only need to deal with one service to get access to the many different services available for the user. If the user needs to create accounts for those other services, let Facebook deal with that too. Open ID and OAuth don’t remedy this situation either.

As more and more services begin to be available, this problem with magnify itself. We need a standard that includes service discover and service management through a proxy. Preferably and open standard that plays well with Open ID and OAuth. Anyone know of a solution to this problem? Is there a remedy out there?